P2P prosecution

A Georgia State IT administrator is being prosecuted for installing P2P software on college computers. The university says that in so doing, he robbed them of more than $400,000 worth of bandwidth. This, even though the software primarily ran during the December break, when the computers were otherwise idle and unused. If you use a P2P distributed-computing application like SETI@home, could you be vulnerable to the same kind of prosecution? Let’s hope the court sees the ridiculousness of this case and doesn’t set a dangerous precedent. Granted, companies (and universities) have the right to set and enforce policies regarding the use of the computing hardware and networking bandwidth they own. But criminal prosecution? Get a grip.